Compare These Passages in 2 Peter and in Jude

Both these passages are long, but it seems like they are speaking of almost the same issues. Notice Sodom and Gomorrah are both mentioned.

2 Peter 2:1-19 (ESV)

1 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.
2 And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
3 And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.
4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment;
5 if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;
6 if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly;
7 and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked
8 (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard);
9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment,
10 and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones,
11 whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord.
12 But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction,
13 suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you.
14 They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children!
15 Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing,
16 but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.
17 These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved.
18 For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error.
19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.

Compare that to this passage in Jude.

Jude 1:4-16 (ESV)

4 For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.
5 Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.
6 And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—
7 just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
8 Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones.
9 But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.”
10 But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively.
11 Woe to them! For they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error and perished in Korah’s rebellion.
12 These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted;
13 wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.
14 It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones,
15 to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
16 These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage.

How might these passages affect your understanding of Sodom when referred to in the Scripture?

I can find three verses in Jeremiah that discuss Sodom (Jeremiah 23:14; 49:18; 50:40).

The most likely in Jeremiah that was referenced is:

Jeremiah 23:14 (ESV)14 But in the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from his evil; all of them have become like Sodom to me, and its inhabitants like Gomorrah.”

However, this verse just states they have “become like Sodom to me” not necessarily that they committed adultery and lying like Sodom (although I’m sure Sodom did).

The most likely verse is the one Terry referenced a couple of days ago.

Ezekiel 16:49-50 (ESV)49 Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.
50 They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.

Now there could always be a more vague reference that doesn’t use the word Sodom but still references it.

I am not so sure strange flesh is more defiling to the Lord than false teachers. It would appear, from these passages, that false teachers are equally wicked and bring about sinful behavior {in the sense that they do NOT preach on repentance}. I think Peter says it well in this verse, ’14 They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children! ‘
These false teachers are accursed children because of their false teachings; they are extremely dangerous. We find warnings about false teachers throughout scripture, our Lord Himself warned us in Matthew 24:4 ‘ see that no one leads you astray’. Deception is just as deadly an evil as sexual sin, or any sin. The wrath of God is brought about by an increase in sin, all sin. The evidence is that we see sin of every kind increasing all around us, which is what Paul said would happen in 2 Timothy 3:13. He also stated in that same verse the cause of the increase…false teachers. False teaching leads to a false sense of security, which in turn leads to wrong living. That is why we are warned so sternly throughout His word to be on guard. When a ‘Christian leader’ compromises on sin and assures his/her followers they are ‘okay’ or in right standing with God, and yet refuses to command them to repent and forsake sin, the door is left wide open for rampant sin. This is what we are currently seeing. We now have the departure from the faith by some as they devote themselves to doctrines of demons {1 Tim. 4:1}, as a result, we see 2 Tim. 3:1-5 rampant throughout our society. Sexual sin is a result of false teaching; the conscience not being pricked with the true Gospel as the dead in sin sinner continues on down the broad road. They follow their pied pipers straight to hell, all the while thinking they are ‘right with God’.

Just had to print out this portion of one of the verses you referenced.

2 Timothy 3:2-5 (ESV)

2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good,
4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,
5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

The severest punishment in hell is reserved for false teachers. Homosexuality is one of the sins that calls down fire from God and destruction here on this earth. It was the major sin of Sodom. Yes, there were other sins, as listed in Ezekiel, but Genesis 19 clearly shows why they were destroyed. What denomination is your church, Ma? Many churches today are saying that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because the were simply bad people or inhospitable. Don’t buy it. False teachers are saying that going after strange flesh was not the major sin of Sodom. Like the previous commenter said, sexual sin is a result of false teaching.

Ma,
How do they interpret Genesis 19!!! Again, straying from God’s word leads to being turned over to depravity, immorality, and a host of other sins. God does not intervene until sin is rampant, and the sin of homosexuality was indeed rampant in Sodom.
As for the reference to Jeremiah, I am not familiar with that. Let’s all work together to see if we can find out what this is in reference to.

Sisters in Christ {and brothers, if you are reading this},
I thought it good to share with you this excerpt from John MacArthur’s sermon entitled, ‘What God thinks of Homosexuals’….

“Now, first of all, let’s define it. The sodomite is a person who engages in sexual activity with another person of the same sex. That is sodomy, the sodomite; and, frankly, it’s nothing new. We think, you know, “Oh, we’ve discovered a new one in our day.” No, this is an oldie. Take you all the way back to Genesis 19. Clear back in the first book. You know, when you get back to Genesis 19, you’re right back at the start; and here’s the first time we run into this, and we’re barely into the Book of Genesis…We’ve barely gotten off the ground; and, along with all the other things that appeared in the first 15 chapters of Genesis that Satan brought along to try to destroy God’s basic monogamous design, this is another one.

“There came two angels to Sodom at evening,” and these two angels came to visit Lot, having visited Abraham. They came into Lot’s house, and all of the sodomites, the homosexuals in town saw them and were astounded at their beauty, no doubt, and the aura that was around them. Because of their perversion, they came, and they wanted to sleep with them, to rape them…They came and tried to knock the door down; and, finally, as the story goes on, and we’ll go into in detail next week, they…they had to…God had to literally come and blind them, strike them all blind. And, of course, immediately following that, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The city was full of homosexuals, and that’s where you get the term sodomy, sodomite. Somebody who commits the sin of Sodom.

Now, Ezekiel tells us that Sodom was not just a whole civilization of homosexuals, but that Sodom had given itself over to the gratification of the lust of the flesh, and it had manifested itself among other ways in homosexuality; and this is just one perversion that existed there among many, for which it was destroyed; but this was one particular central one that is pointed out in the passage as these Sodomites attempted to rape angelic visitors, the angels of God visiting Lot…

This sin, coupled with the rest, destroyed the nation Israel…brought divine judgment. Same thing that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed Jerusalem and Israel, and later was to destroy Greece and Rome. Did you know that in Greece, Socrates was a practicing homosexual? So was Plato. Wrote in his Dialoguesa whole section in the symposium exalting homosexual love. Great part of Greek life. Did you know that 14 out of the first 15 Roman emperors were homosexuals? In The 12 Caesars, a book written by Suetonius, there is an interesting chronicle of the lives of these Caesars, and it just goes through detail after detail describing their homosexual lifestyle and how it pervaded the Empire.

Did you know, for example, that Julius Caesar was a homosexual? It is said that Julius Caesar was the catamite, and catamite is another term for a sodomite or the partner of a homosexual. He was the catamite of King Nicodemus, and Dolabella called his the queen’s rival and the inner partner of the royal bed…Did you know that Caesar Augustus was a homosexual? In fact, he himself was a homosexual who sold his service for 3,000 gold pieces…and he softened the hair on his legs by burning them with a red hot walnut shell, so he’d bor…be more desirable to his male partner…and they still do things like that, shave their legs and so forth. Ooh.

Tiberius…Tiberius Caesar was also a homosexual, and his problem was manifested in the way that he was always adopting young boys…with homosexual designs, and Tiberius was also a sadist in the way he treated those little boys. Caligula was a homosexual, as well as committing constant incest with his sisters. Nero seduced little boys. He found one he particularly liked by the name of Sporus, and so he had him castrated, put a bridal veil on him, a bridal gown, and put on an official ceremony and married him; and when Nero died, the next Caesar took up the relationship with the little boy.

So it was in Rome. So it was in Greece. So it was in Israel. So it was in Sodom. So it’s always been…You see, it’s nothing new. Nothing new at all. It’s been going on throughout the history of humanity. It’s exactly what Romans 1 says, “Man continues to invent ways to do evil.”…Isaiah chapter 1 verse 10 was speaking out to Israel, and he literally called them, “ye rulers of Sodom.” He literally said in Isaiah 1:10, “You’re just like they were.”…Man has always had this.”

You say, “But, John, it seems like today it’s worse than ever.” Well, I don’t guess it’s worse than ever. Maybe it’s… maybe it’s just the proliferation of it and the publication of it is worse, because we have such media possibility. One writer I read this week said that he watched television for 14 hours, and within those 14 hours of just any set time that he established, he established a 14-hour period, and he watched television for that 14 hours, he listed 59 references to homosexuality.

“Well,” you say, “how did we get where we are today in this mess? Why, I can remember when I was a boy,” you might say, “or when I was a little kid 30 years ago, nobody talked about this; and anybody who was this was hiding off somewhere. How did it get so far out and so widespread?” Well, maybe I’ll give you a little background. In 1881, there was born a man by the name of Sigmund Freud; and Sigmund Freud recognized by the time he was older and began to work in psychological counseling and in developing certain psychological behavior pattern solutions, that homosexuality was a major problem in human society; and so he tackled the problem of homosexuality or sodomy; and he began to try to develop ways in which they could help these poor sodomites; because he concluded that it was a psychological sickness related directly to a domineering mother. That was Freud’s theory; and, as…as many other things from Freud stood the test of time, that one did for quite a long time. People believed that was true. That, in fact, it was a problem from a domineering mother; and so Freud faced this problem; and he just passed it off as a psychological problem, not the fault of the person involved. You see, that was Freud’s ploy all the way. It’s what your mother did to you. He even said about people who believe in God, “That’s what your father did to you…made you need a substantive father image,” and so when you grew out of your family relationship, you substituted God for your father.

Freud was followed in the ’30s by a man by the name of Harlock Ellis, and Harlock Ellis published a sex manual really brining this thing right out into the open and dealing with the issue of sodomy, and he pointed out some famous homosexuals; and his conclusion was that these great men accomplished what they did because their genius was related to them being sodomites. In other words, their homosexuality was hereditary; and homosexuality had implicit in it a bent toward the arty and a bent toward the genius…so that homosexuality…he denied what Freud said, was no sickness at all based upon a domineering mother; but it was hereditary. It was given to you and, with it, came certain abilities. He listed, for example, Erasmus, the Dutch humanist and scholar and author of the 16th century, as a homosexual genius. Michelangelo, the great Italian artist, is a homosexual genius. Christopher Marlowe, the English poet and playwright; Francis Bacon, the English essayist; Lord Byron, the author of so many poems, the British author; Oscar Wilde; and the American poet Walt Whitman; and he said, “All of these people are homosexuals, and you can see the genius of homosexuality.” And so he said it’s hereditary.

And those have been the two schools of thought. Some have adhered to Freud, that it was a psychological illness; and, incidentally, for years and years and years after Freud, there were people trying to help people get rid of this psychological illness. But Harlock Ellis came along in the ’30s and said, “Hey, this is no illness. Look at Michelangelo. Look at Walt Whitman. Look at Lord Byron. Look at Erasmus. Look at the Christopher Marlowe. Look at Francis Bacon. Look at all these fantastic geniuses. This is something that is hereditary…

Freud and Ellis were followed by a third person who brought us to our modern dilemma. His name was Kinsey, and in 1942 and 1953, Kinsey, Albert Kinsey published the Kinsey reports, in which he made homosexuality statistically representative of a certain amount of people in America. He said, “Let’s face it, folks. Statistically, this is an alternate lifestyle. It’s here. It’s dominant. We might as well face it. We might as well enjoy it. We might as well live with it.” And so you can see the progression. First there was Freud, who said, “It’s all around us, but it’s…it’s…it’s a sickness, and we gotta help folks.” And then there was Ellis, who said, “This is no sickness. This is hereditary, and it’s almost bordering on a certain kind of genius.” And then there was Kinsey, who said, “And there’s a lot of ’em, so we might as well face up to it. It’s a part of our society. Don’t get upset about it.”

And with those three men came the flow that has brought us to the place we are today – the total acceptance of this; and it’s interesting that the whole ideas of Freud, that this is psychological illness, for the most part in secular psychology and medicine are entirely rejected today. Listen to this. The American Psychiatric Association, in our decade, has removed homosexuality from its standard diagnostic manual, because it no longer considers it a psychological disorder. Why? They say it is hereditary. You’re born that way…

And so we might as well let it go. So in England in 1967, they passed the Sex Offenses Act, which permits homosexual acts by consenting adults; and, since then, according to one sodomite leader, England has become the “gayest country in the world, a homosexual paradise on earth.” And, believe me, in the next 10 or 15 years, America’s gonna be equally a paradise for this. Do you know that in England, homosexuals, sodomites are invited into the public school system to present to the elementary school children their particular alternate lifestyle, so that the young people can make their own choice?…

Some say there are 30 million sodomites in America. The Denver Post recently reported in their Sunday Magazine that some of the major TV producers are gay and “have agreed to cooperate with the Gay Liberation party to portray homosexuals accurately and honestly on television.”…We’re right in it, folks. It’s not new, but certain situations in recent decades have contributed to a massive drowning of…of society in this. Television, movies, books, magazines, and all the while, the sodomites are crying out as if they were a mistreated minority who have no rights. And, frankly, in a relativistic society like ours, if they’re loud enough and get enough votes, they’ll be accepted. Sodomites in the land. It destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. It destroyed Israel. It destroyed Greece. It destroyed Rome. The track record isn’t too good; and as I’ve said so often, if God doesn’t destroy America pretty soon, He’ll have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah…
You can read the entire transcript at http://www.gty.org/Resources/Sermons/1375_What-God-Thinks-of-Homosexuals?q=the+sin+of+Sodom

Don’t get the wrong idea about our church, he wasn’t saying that homosexuality isn’t an abomination, just that Sodom and Gomorrah had a lot of other issues, as well. And that the whole culture was down the tubes and like us here in the USA, it will just get worse and worse..we’re seeing it.

In many ways, the removal of God’s restraint from the evilness of men IS a judgement unto itself.

Thanks Berean Wife, those verses are probably what he was referring to.

That’s good, Lyn. Stunning. Yes, Sodom had other sins as well, as listed in Ezekiel. The references in Jeremiah are Jer.23:14; Jer.49:18; Jer.50:40 — Sodom shown as an example of how God will punish. I do fear for our country. I used to live in England. I still have friends there. I heard a story from that friend that an elderly couple, in their 80’s, went around an apartment building in England with tracts to pass about saying how homosexuality was a sin. The elderly couple was arrested. They were let go, but with a severe warning. There is no free speech any more. I fear if our whole country goes this way.

I’m glad, Ma, that your SS teacher was not saying that homosexuality was not an abomination. They did have other sins in Sodom, but this was the one for which they were eventually overthrown.

And, Lyn, yes, the worst sin is that of being a false teacher, because they take others to hell with them. I’m going to read the links you gave. Thanks.

Mary, John MacArthur is biblically sound in his teaching/expository preaching of God’s word. You probably already figured out his website, http://www.gty.org. I have been tremendously blessed by this man, as well as men of days gone by like J.C. Ryle, C.H. Spurgeon, Thomas Watson, and others.
Another man who preaches with the power of God is Paul Washer, his website is http://www.hcmissions.com
You can also listen to and download sermons from both of these gentlemen, plus another favorite of mine, Albert N. Martin, at http://www.sermonaudio.com.

First Things First

The most important fact necessary before reading this website is to examine yourself to see if you are a Christian. If you are not a Christian, much of this would be ‘Foolishness’ to you.
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1 Cor 2:14 The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
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If you are not a Christian then I recommend reading the following:

What is a Berean?

Acts 17:11
"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." NIV

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